So the question to ask about the Michaelina Wautier exhibition at the Royal Academy in London must be: Is the hype about this recently rediscovered 17th-century woman painter justified? The answer: Yes, absolutely. She really does merit acknowledgement -- and not just because we recognise a woman working in a man's world. Her art shows she was extremely talented, producing superb canvases covering a diverse range of subject matter. What's more, she painted very large pictures featuring male nudes, such as Bacchus, despite her contemporaries thinking that was not the sort of thing a female artist could do. And her portraits are wonderfully lively and lifelike. This is Martino Martini, an Italian Jesuit missionary who travelled to China in the 1640s. It was painted in 1654, when Michaelina was around 40. Martini, who was staying at the Jesuit College in Brussels, is depicted wearing traditional Chinese silk court attire and a hat of fur and feathers. A rather substantial...
Raphael died before he was 40, and yet he's still reckoned among the very greatest of Italian Renaissance artists. A new Raphael exhibition at London's National Gallery aims to show him as an all-round giant -- in painting, sculpture, poetry, architecture and more -- exploring why he can be regarded on a level with Michelangelo and Leonardo. More than 90 examples of his work include loans from the Uffizi, the Vatican, the Louvre and the Prado. The show is on from April 9 to July 31, and standard tickets are an initially eye-catching £24 (more with Gift Aid). As we've noted before, prices for the biggest exhibitions in the capital have been steadily creeping upwards, but then £24 is relatively cheap compared with, say, the cost of tickets to a Premier League football match or a West End theatre performance. At the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, tickets are a reasonable-sounding £10 for Canaletto's Venice Revisited , which opens on April 1. This show features Can...